Tag: pluto

prokopetz:

pairinstability:

ma-wile:

pairinstability:

Remember kids: Pluto is not a planet, WAS never a planet, and any acknowledgement of Pluto as a planet was an error of assumption

Fuckihg fight me right now viva la Pluto

F u c k you it was a clerical error!! The real ninth planet is out there but it’s not Pluto! Stop ruining science!!!!

A clerical error? Oh, no – the truth is far more absurd.

(Hold on, folks – this requires a bit of background.)

In a nutshell, since the late 19th Century, it had been suspected
that there was a ninth planet, based on apparent irregularities in the
orbit of Uranus. This as-yet-hypothetical planet, whose gravitational
influence would have accounted for those irregularities, was termed
“Planet X”.

The trouble is, nobody could find the thing, no matter how
hard they looked. That seemed to have changed in 1930, when a new moving
object was finally detected on the outskirts of the Solar system. When
word of this discovery got out, the media declared that Planet X had
been found, and the object was subsequently named “Pluto”.

However, there was a problem with the newly dubbed Pluto: its faint
albedo and lack of a visible disk suggested that it was much too small
to be Planet X. In fact, while school textbooks treated the matter as
resolved, the truth of the matter is that we had no idea what
Pluto was – we didn’t even know for sure whether it was a planet at
all, much less that it was Planet X. Though little reported-on by the
mainstream press, the search continued.

It wasn’t until 1992 that data from the Voyager flyby of
Neptune revealed that prior estimates of the masses of the outer planets
had been slightly out of whack. With the corrections enabled by Voyager, the apparent anomaly in Uranus’ orbit was proven to be a math error: there was no Planet X after all.

So what the hell was Pluto?

Eventually, it was determined that Pluto had less than 0.2% of its
initially estimated mass, and that its appearance near the predicted
position of Planet X’s orbit was just a bizarre coincidence. In spite of
this, it retained its provisional planetary status; it had already captured the public’s imagination, and the fact that Pluto
was the only “planet” to have been discovered by an American created
enormous political pressure against classifying it as anything else.

This would remain the status quo until the discovery of additional
outer-Solar-system objects as large or larger than Pluto in the mid 00s –
most notably Eris – forced the classification issue to be resolved.

TL/DR version: Pluto was never uncontroversially classified as a
planet in the first place. It just happened to coincidentally be near
the orbit of a hypothetical ninth planet that was later proven not to
exist, and sort of inherited the planetary status of its phantom sibling
on a provisional basis due to a combination of institutional inertia
and politics.

(As icing on the cake, at the time of this posting, early 2016, there’s new – albeit controversial – evidence that there really is a mysterious ninth planet lurking out there. Note, however, that this conjecture is based on a completely different set of anomalies from the ones that led to the Planet X hypothesis.)